The Foreshadowing, Marcus Sedgewick

The Foreshadowing tells the story of Alexandra, a 17 year old girl from Victorian London. Alexandra has visions of the future, in particular she has visions of the deaths of those around her and of her family.

Though it is Alexandra’s vision of her brother’s death in WWI and her journey to the fields of France to try to prevent it that drives the plot of the novel, that isn’t the most resonant part of the novel. Rather it is Sedgewick’s description of the nursing of, and the nurses that care for, the injured servicemen that carries.

Alexandra’s portents of imminent deaths are explained by way of allusion and reference to Cassandra, this is only briefly touched on and I suppose would encourage readers to look up the Trojan myths themselves.

I have to confess that I didn’t really enjoy this novel, though I understand I’m not the target audience. I didn’t like the two dimensional quality of her parents, Victorian stereotypes of stern patriarch and submissive, weak-willed mother and I found the supernatural element to the novel predictable. However, that said the novel did teach me things I didn’t know, I understood very little about the role of VAD nurses beforehand, and I think that Sedgewick portrayed the ‘shellshock’ victims sensitively, showing the reader a time when the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder was only beginning to gather medical and public attention, and remains a sensitive issue to this day.

Similarly, Sedgewick delivers the horrors of the WWI trenches, men with facial wounds that ‘stop them looking human’ (p.64). Through the eyes of the VAD nurses the statistics of the injured and the dead become more comprehensible, the sheer volume of those arriving at the field hospital, day by day. Sedgewick juxtaposes the reality of war with the jingoism in which it was received at home, Alexandra says,
‘When I look at a broken body, all I feel is sadness. Not pride, not pity, or horror or hatred. To me those are false feelings, emotions we put on top of our sadness … because we don’t want to feel afraid’ (p.65).

Overall, as we approach of the centenary of the outbreak of WWI, this book is a good tool for reflecting the nature of war in a slightly different way to other novels, such as Private Peaceful, which may make it appealing to young readers.

 

Silverfin, Charlie Higson

I was pleased to see this book on my reading list, it’s one that I thought I’d like to read when I first heard the furore about it (sometime in 2005), but it was one of those things I never got around to. I remember thinking it was an ambitious project, and one that might be difficult to pull off, for a few reasons; firstly making the written Bond (I’m not a fan) appealing and relevant to a young, modern audience, how the new Bond would be placed in relation to the written Bond and the film franchise (due to be reinvigorated in 06 with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale), how it would compare to Horowitz’s Alex Rider, and finally how it would appeal to a female audience, or if it would even try.

I should also confess that I am no great fan of Higson’s work, however it’s fair to say that I know little to nothing of his writing, save that I found ‘The Fast Show’ largely unfunny (and a bit homophobic) and the remake of ‘Randall and Hopkirk Deceased’ catastrophic. That said, I was pleased within the first twenty pages, the prologue implied that the unnamed boy may have been the young Bond, and so left the reader shocked by its conclusion, the sense of mystery that you’d associate with a spy novel was evident, with a bit of derring-do thrown in, the prologue here is clever, it sets the tone so well that by the time Bond appears and introduces himself as ‘Bond, James Bond’ (p.18) I was ready to smirk.

Higson’s young Bond is a likeable character, he’s clever and talented, but not arrogant or headstrong, instead there is a sense that he has something to hide, he is tight-lipped in Eton about his parents and his sense of loss is well-handled.

The thrills of the novel are very Bondian; secret dungeons, eugenic scientists, powerful meglomanical men and twisted, sadistic henchmen are all present, that isn’t too say that the Silverfin project is completely predictable, and it is clever. The novel did address my concerns, I felt that Higson tried to address the chauvinism of Bond carefully, though the Wilder Lawless is a bit flat (the girl who can hold her own with any boy), I thought his Aunt more rounded, convincing as a substitute matriarch, strident and clever.

The novel deals well under the weight of all the Bonds that have come before, there are a few knowing hints (Lawless’s horse is improbably called Martini), and the Scottish connection is nice. The strength is that the young Bond is not obviously a minaturised Bond, and so is much more likeable than I would have anticipated.

¹Higson, C. (2005) Silverfin. London: Puffin.

Holes, Louis Sachar

This was a fun read. Sachar’s writing has a dry wit, the novel is written in sentences that are short and punchy, and each delivers something. One reviewer said there was not one false sentence, and I agree with that.

The book is ostensibly about a labour camp for juveniles, Camp Green Lake. In part, it’s the camp that is the main character of the novel, barren, dry, hard and cracked lake bed where each boy must dig a hole 5′ by 5′ each day. The food is awful, water is rationed and the minimal shade that exists is owned by the Warden.

The warden is a great villain for a children’s book, bizarrely inventive in her punishments (poisoned nail varnish) and hysterical in defeat, she puts one in mind of the Grand Witch from Roald Dahl (The Witches).

The boy at the heart of the story, the innocent Stanley, has a kind of geekish, fatalisitc charm to him, and remains endearing throughout, its enjoyable to follow him as he grows into the hero of the story.

Although there are moments of true pathos in the story, in particular the torture and death of Kissing Kate the outlaw and the fate of Sam, there is a great humour throughout the book.

The flashback stories of a young man’s friendship with an elderly gypsy lady in the early 1900s eastern europe, and the tragic mixed-race relationship in 1950s(?) Texas of Kate and Sam are entertaining and heart-wrenching by equal measure, the description of Kate’s growing feelings for Sam is well-written for a young audience, and brought a smile to my lips,when she finally runs out of odd jobs, and he has a surplus of peaches. The difficult subject of that kind of ingrained racism in the deep south in that time is well handled, the terribleness, brutality and ridiculousness of the violence all explained in the shooting of the old donkey.

The circularity of the lead characters name (the palindromic Stanley Yelnats) reflects the nature of the plot, switching back and forth in the telling of the stories of Elya Yelnats and Madame Zeroni, Kate and Sam and Stanley and Zero. The ending of the book, which brings together all of the stories neatly, may be too sentimental for some readers but is one that I personally enjoyed, and that most of he young readers of this book (9-12 year olds) would also.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

Reading this story made me re-remember how much I love a good story, in the old fashioned fairytale way of things. I remember fairytales from my childhood, and they weren’t all Disney-fied retellings of Grimm with the edges rounded off, some were dark and quite terrifying, I direct you toward the Mabinogion; the tale of Branwen, Daughter of Llŷr was a particular gruesome favourite.

There’s a joy to be hand in a traditional tale that is hard to replicate, and the child in me really enjoyed reading Haroun, the traditional theme of a mirrored world where characters from the real world exist in subverted form is comforting. Though the adult also appreciated Rushdie’s jokes, when the babbling nonsense speak includes ‘Gogogol’ and ‘Kafkafka’.

The novel certainly has an allegorical feel, the sea of stories becoming polluted, changing and subverting the meaning of the past to control a population has obvious implications.

That said, there were aspects of the novel that made me uncomfortable, for example the portrayal of Princess Batcheat (meaning chitchat), I thought was unnecessarily cruel, and all together women don’t fair particularly well in the story, Haroun’s mother runs away with the neighbour, that neighbour’s wife is presented comically, though the girl that Haroun befriends has charm and feistiness.

The adventure is of course, thrilling.  The world is vividly described and the action exciting.  Perhaps one of the best things about the story is in the representation of the villain of the piece, Khattam-Shud.  Rushdie delivers a universal truth about the mundanity of tyrants to his young reader, instead of being ‘notorious and terrifying’ he is instead, ‘a skinny, scrawny, measly, weasly, snivelling, clerical type’.

How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff

When I was thinking where to begin writing about A Curious Incident, one of the first things I thought of was how important Christopher’s voice is the the novel – it carries the weight of the book and holds all things to together. Its the exact same thing with Daisy in How I Live Now, hers is a truely unique voice.

We come across two different Daisys in the narration, seperated by age, but also structure, syntax and punctuation, both the voice remains consistent, and ages with the experience and trauma of the character. She is funny, sassy, vulnerable and angry in different measures at different times, trying to find a balance and her own sense of identity.

It seems as though that sense of transience is embedded int he novel and the plot, the Aunt that goes away but does not return, her awkward relationship with her father that is not resolved, the war that lasts through most of the book but is vague and distance. Definitely as sense of transience that doesn’t quite happen, it just lingers there in suspension.

Described basically the plot could sound like any other child’s adventure, they find themselves alone, in a foreign landscape, left by and large to defend for themselves. But Rosoff gives us anything but Narnia and the ragtag ensemble that are her cousins are certainly no Pevensies. Instead, as strange and eccentric as Daisy’s cousins are, they are not unbelievable, and the war in which they find themselves surrounded by is horribly realistic; by juxtaposing Daisy’s early blase attitude to violence (as portrayed in the media), ‘rape…always ignore[d] unless the rapist turns out to be a priest or someone on TV’, and the reality of the violence that follows, in particular he shooting of Major McEvoy, Rosoff gives us a true picture of the gruesome realities of war.

Daisy’s taboo relationship with her cousin, Edmond (who has something of Sebastian Flyte about him to me), is really well-handled, the action opaque but the meaning and feeling behind it well explained, the force of love and the confidence that comes from someone else’s regard is tender.

I would have liked to have come across Daisy when I was a young teenager, the best praise that I can offer this novel is that I think reading this book would have helped with all that that entails.

A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness

This novel was based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, who unfortunately died from cancer before being able to turn her idea into a novel. Patrick Ness, belonging to the same publisher, was then asked to write the novel.

A Monster Calls follows Callum, a young boy that is losing his mother to cancer. Over the course of the novel he is visited several times by a giant, part yew tree and part monster who tells him stories, unconventional fables that have no simple morality, witches who are good, good rulers that are also murderers;
‘There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere inbetween’¹. (p.84)

Callum isn’t afraid of the monster, he has worse fears, in particular a recurring nightmare. It is through his encounters with this monster (such as it is) and the hearing and telling of stories that Callum prepares himself for his mothers death emotionally. As the monster tells him, ‘I did not come to heal her. I came to heal you’ (p.205)

It is a beautifully written book, and captures the ugly effect that cancer has on the lives of its sufferers and their family. There is the horror of trying new and ever more unlikely treatments that fail to work, teachers that are made nervous and can only offer weak platitudes, guilt-ridden absent fathers and bullies who sense Callum’s alienation and sense of invisibility. The treatment of callum’s recurring nightmare, and the guilt at the root of it, which is undoubtedly familiar to anyone who has lost someone through long term terminal illness, is handled deftly and senstively – I cried my eyes out.

As heart-rending as the novel is, it also has moments of tenderness and beauty, at his mother’s death bed of course, but also, particularly in the last moments between Callum and his grandmother.

¹Ness, P. (2011)  A Monster Calls, London: Walker Books

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

I don’t think I need outline the plot of this particular prize-winning book (Whitbread Book of the Year, Guardian fiction Prize, longlisted for the Booker), I know very few people that haven’t read it, and the stage play adapted from it has ensured it’s popularity 10 years on from its publication.

The Curious Incident could be reductively described as a dectective story, told from the point of view of a child/young adut for children/young adults. Immediately, however, there is a snag, Christopher is 15, he has the vocabulary of a 15 year old, but he doesn’t feel 15, this is because he has Asperger’s, and it is that that is central to the novel, but not in a cumbersome way.

The great strength of the novel is Christopher’s voice, it is utterly unmistakable and direct. The joy of though is that though Christopher finds it difficult to comprehend and relate to the emotions of other people, he isn’t emotionless; through the course of the narrative, though his viewpoint is unusual and alien to the majority of readers, its quite easy to sit comfortably with it, until a point comes where Christopher’s view seems the most sensible, the other characters hysterical by comparison.

Christopher does not lie, he doesn’t understand its purpose, in the line of that logic he doesn’t understand the purpose of jokes, though he does understand their form and the reasoning, despite that it is a very funny book, but the laughter is never directed toward Christopher. Its also extremely moving, in its scarcity of emotional description it puts me in mind of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which was heartbreakingly beautiful; in The Curious Incident the pathos is tangible, particularly when he discovers that his mother is not in fact dead and then later when as a consequence he rejects his father.

So, though the murder mystery is worthy of Midsomer Murders, it’s much, much more than a detective story.

Parvana’s Journey, Deborah Ellis

Parvana’s Journey follows its eponymous protagonist, Parvana, on her journey through Afghanistan. The novel’s opening scene sets the tone to follow; Parvana kneels beside her father’s grave, dressed as a boy for safety in a village where she and her father were strangers. She’s taken in by a family, but fearing both exposure as a girl and on learning that the men of the village intend to try to sell her to the Taliban, she flees the village and continues on the journey she had begun with her father (the earlier novel The Breadwinner) to find her mother, sister and brother.

On the journey Parvana meets other children, a baby, the sole survivor of a bombed village (whom she names Hassan), an angry young boy, starving and missing a leg (Asif) and a disturbed young girl (Leila) who lives surrounded by land mines with her catatonic grandmother. It is through her relationships with theese children that we are shown that despite her best efforts to conceal it, Parvana is only a child, and that being a child offers no protection; Ellis givs us harrowing episodes that show the life left to parentless children in war-ravaged environments, from the initial scheme to sell her to the Taliban, to a shop-keeper swindling them when they worked for meagre rations.

“‘Is it hard to kill a child’ [Leila] asked suddenly … ‘It should be,’ Parvana said, ‘but some people seem to find it awfully easy.'”¹(p. 141)

Ellis’s prose is vivid, she describes the hunger of the children after days without food in heart-wrenching detail. The book is heavy on the facts of war, such as the nature of landmines and how they are sometimes not buried, but displayed on top of the ground “brightly painted to look like pretty things. People would try to pick them up and get their arms blown off” (p.101), and other gruesome realities, such as the effects of unwashed sores.

The observation also extends to the devastating psychological aspects of war, there are the bleak images of the Leila’s corpse-like grandmother and of the wailing woman with whom Parava crosses paths, “Some people are dead before they die…You cannot help them and they will take away your hope” (p.29).  This is also handled more deftly, there is Asif, so abused and damaged that he struggles to outwardly accept or demonstrate kindness, and Leila, who has evolved a strange kind of mystic, yet brutal, quasi-religion to cope with the landmines that surround her home and the ‘gifts’ that it gives, in terms of its victims, whether goats for meat, or a pedlar whose wares gave a lifeline.

Parvana’s Journey is a sorrowful book, and much of its drama and emotional weight are in the closing pages, to great effect, because here most of the horror is true and real and happening now. The grim reality of overcrowded and under-resourced refugee camps, where safety is still not assured, where queues stretch for hours for food or aid and sometimes form where neither exist, but with hope that it might.

The realities of refugee camps can be seen here: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/events/refugeecamp/guide/

¹Ellis, D. (2004) Parvana’s Journey, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dear Nobody, Berlie Docherty

This novel tells of two teenagers about to sit their A-levels; Chris is planning to go to University, Helen a musical conservatoire, then, after a unplanned moment, Helen discovers she’s pregnant.

I really wanted to like this book, it is nicely written, I like the structure of it, the difference in tone between an omniscient narrator that tells the story from over Chris’s shoulder and the snippets of letter to the unborn child (the ‘Nobody’ of the title), but I couldn’t.

I struggled to relate to Helen, her character is mainly conveyed through Chris’s biased impression, but from that and other episodes in the text I had the impression of a sensible and intelligent girl, and so her lengthy delay in taking a pregnancy test confused me. This could be in part related to her anxiety, but because we share very little of that in the early stages of the novel its very difficult to relate to.

The revelation that much of her mother’s anger and frustration comes from being a ‘bastard’, which, it is suggested has shaped her childhood experience, seems bizarelly vehement. She makes reference to it being ‘dirty’ and doesn’t speak to her mother, and, as though to increase the strangeness, it also appears anachronistic; the novel is set in the late nineties/early noughties, placing her mother’s childhood in the late sixties/early seventies, which is not a time I would associate with the kind of ‘marriage first’ piety that existed in earlier decades.

Furthermore, the novel has something to say about motherhood, but I’m not sure what that message is. We have Helen’s mother with her neuroses, her friend’s mother, the archetypal loving matriarch, Chris’s aunt who had an abortion that’s haunted her, Chris’s mother, who doubted her parenting skills and left her children, and Helen’s grandmother, in the throws of dementia, and formerly a young, unwed mother. The portraits of these women are two-dimensional, the thread that connects them all to Helen is the ownership they took over their decisions to become, or not become, mothers. In this Helen has an about-turn from wanting an abortion to wanting to keep the child. Decision made, she turns from Chris, feeling ready to have the baby but not to commit to such a young relationship, freezing him out of the pregnancy. For Chris, who had not wanted her to have the abortion it comes as a blow.

Perhaps it is this, and the ending, that I struggle with. The men in this novel are strange, pliable creatures. Chris’s father is kind, but meek, Helen’s father is ineffectual and her grandfather saintly; they are as two-dimensional as the mothers. Chris wants to be a part of his child’s life but accepts Helen’s decision to exclude him. As the novel ends, Helen does not go to the Conservatoire, instead deciding to raise her baby, her plans to attend another University or do another course are left vague.  Chris goes on a cycling holiday to France, his summer plans uninterrupted and then continues on to University, though not without regret. Berlie Docherty gives us a fairly rich portrait of a good young man in Chris, he is moral, he tries to do the right thing, but nonetheless the novel ends with the responsibility for the child resting with Helen alone. It’s a strange ending, it does tell of the unfairness of teenage pregnancy and the problems facing young mothers; however it is unfair in its treatment of young fathers and, I feel, is weak in its conclusion and reinforcement of gender and parental stereotyping.

Bog Child, Siobhan Dowd

The novel centres around the teenage Fergus, in the opening chapter he’s illegally peat-cutting with his Uncle on the other side of the Northern Irish border, when he comes across the body of a child, initially he fears it’s the victim of the provisional IRA (the Provos) before it becomes apparent that the child is from Iron Age, preserved by the bog.  However, the age of the body doesn’t dispel that initial sense of unease when a noose is found around her neck.  From here on she (Mel) weaves in and out of Fergus’s consciousness and the story.

The tension from the start continues throughout the book, we find ourselves in the midst of the 1980-1 hunger strikes, it’s ’81 and Bobby Sands has died, and others are still starving or are comatose.  Hunger also winds itself through the story; starting with Joe, Fergus’s brother who is on hunger strike in the infamous HMP Maze, to the iron-age girl blamed for the famine and Cora, the archaeologist’s daughter and Fergus’s love interest and her implied eating disorder, and the other kinds of hunger, for a change, for an escape for love and for a sense of justice.

Other parallels play out between Fergus and Mel’s stories.  The love stories, (Fergus/Cora and Mel/Rur) are deftly handled, Fergus’s emotions are gentle but vibrant and have that unmistakeable tang of young love, and Mel’s love is tender and terrible in its sadness.  Self-sacrifice also has a part to play, Mel gives herself up to a community who offer no other choice, as she says (to paraphrase), if not her, it would be someone else.  In Fergus’s world there are different kinds of sacrifices, Fergus couriering the parcels he believes are explosives for the Provos against his conscience but in the belief he can put an end to his brother’s strike, and the strike itself, political self-sacrifice.  Both Fergus and Mel live under the weight of living in a community that is on the edge of pulling itself apart.  There is also betrayal, Mel betrayed by her brother who knows she’s not to blame for the crime she’s accused of, though in essence its more than one crime, both of murder and of difference, of being other, and the suspicion of bringing bad luck, for Fergus it’s the betrayal of a brother who puts his politics before his mother and siblings and, with more horror, the revelation that his Uncle Tally is a bombmaker, and responsible for the death of Fergus’s squaddie friend, Owain.  The novel ends in the only way it really can, with Fergus leaving, for Scotland and University, with the understanding that ‘life was like running, ninety per cent sweat and toil and ten per cent joy’.